U.s.has To Shift Gears In A Post-industrial World

How To Educate The Young For Jobs In A Competitive United States

September 15, 1991|By PETER B. PACH; Courant Columnist

C There are those among educators and business leaders who expect schools to teach students to think. More accurately, they want schools to inspire students to do the kind of thinking that leads to problem solving.

Some people might think schools already teach children to think, but a chorus of experts will shout down this notion in a moment. Schools are geared to teach facts, and that is hardly enough. Anyone who has spent painful hours memorizing the dates of the French revolution and never found them to be of value on the job will readily agree.

For parents who have moved to the West Hartfords and Glastonburys for their schools, the news might be harder to take. Their children are no more assured of readiness for the work force at the turn of the century than students in distressed systems such as Hartford's.

To be sure, suburban schools send more graduates to college but, unless the students are attending the handful of elite universities, the work they do generally does not promote self-starting. Colleges are often forced to provide remedial work for students who never got the basics in high school. Large numbers of students leave college because they are ill-prepared for the work.

Concern about problems in education led The Courant along with WFSB-TV and the Connecticut Business for Education Coalition to join a national program called "Help Wanted: Education Required." Developed by the nonpartisan Public Agenda Foundation, the program is designed to raise questions about the way we learn and work and to encourage everyone to seek ways to make the United States more competitive.

Nearly one-quarter of all Connecticut students fail to finish high school. State Department of Education figures from 1989 show that 21.2 percent of the students who began four years earlier failed to graduate from Connecticut's public high schools. Broken down by race, the figures show 16.5 percent of the white students dropped out, 37.5 percent of the black students and 51.2 percent of the Hispanic students. Society is losing a valuable and shrinking

resource -- educated entry-level employees. The tendency to put students in "tracks" that have the effect of a "dumb" label helps push many toward the door. A modern school should simply require that everyone achieve minimum levels of competence before leaving.

Schools have become so intent on drilling students to improve test scores rather than focusing on developing their ability to define, evaluate and solve problems that some students are being bored out of school. Problem solving will be one of the primary skills required for top-level jobs in the coming decades. Teachers in a best-of-all-worlds system would encourage students to seek facts rather than wait for them to be hand delivered. A student who learns how to get information is way ahead of one who has simply memorized a list of facts.

No one is advocating abandoning reading, writing and arithmetic (math) as cornerstones of education. In fact, competency tests that would bring more meaning back to diplomas have been proposed. No one would graduate without passing the test. But the atmosphere in which the students achieved competency would change dramatically.

Badi Foster, a vice president at Aetna Life & Casualty and frequent member of state and national panels on education, decries the old-fashioned assembly-line education favored in virtually all schools since the turn of the century. Students, he said, might as well be cars passing down an assembly line. Instead of bolting on fenders, windshields and headlights, teachers offer some history, English and math. The result is a student possessing a Model-T education in a fuel-injected world.

Without a radical change in education, Foster and others say, Connecticut and the United States will slip behind the rest of the world in productivity and standard of living.

The U.S. standard of living has already slipped back toward that of other countries over which we once enjoyed a significant advantage.

The world economy has evolved from an agricultural and simple industrial base. The time when a day of hard work on one machine meant a paycheck that offered material satisfaction is disappearing. Work that will provide a sustained standard of living requires a more sophisticated business organization in which workers make decisions once left to middle managers.

Big companies, United Technologies Corp. among them, are redesigning their work to produce high-quality products faster and cheaper than foreign competitors. The natural advantage the United States gained after World War II has been erased by time. Japan and Germany, along with many other nations, have created work environments that rely on brains more than sheer strength.